These cases are mostly when there's been some kind — of implemented interrogation by the opposition, leaving the nerve-ends bared; but nobody comes off a mission or an interim phase feeling very jolly.

We listened to the rain pattering on the windowsill, and the distant hammering of a road drill where they were doing the gas mains.

'Smoke, sir?'

'No, thanks.'

'Trying to give it up myself.' He lit one and dropped the match into the ashbowl and hit the chrome knob.

'Who is it,' I asked him, 'in Room 6?'

'Couldn't say, sir.'

He said it so fast that I knew it was routine.

It could be Mildmay. Or Sargent. The rest of them had something on the board, I knew that. In any case I was reaching the point where I didn't give a damn who was going to run me: all I wanted to do was get into the field and start moving. The Zarkovic thing had left me feeling hooked and I wanted to know more. There'd been nothing in his wallet, not a damned thing: passport, medical card, Communist membership papers, picture of a dark-haired girl smiling with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, nothing else, nothing to go on. Whatever Milos Zarkovic had brought over from Yugoslavia he'd brought in his head.

I'd taken the Lancia to Marseille and used the phone and they'd told me to come in by air through Paris and here I was, hanging around this bloody office talking to a man I didn't know.

'Looks like setting in, sir,'

'What?'

'The rain.'

'Yes.'

I gave it another five minutes and told him I was going along to the Caff, so if anyone wanted me they knew where to find me.